flash actionscript: DrEv1l's solution won't work since you can't dynamically load PNG files. I also
doubt that even if you could it would be the solution ? JPGs look great in
Flash.

Don't know what to tell you. They look the the same to me as they do just by
themselves. What surprises me is that you haven't even mentioned that the text
is completely unreadable in the smaller versions.

It looks like you have just resized your published swf. If that is the case
then that would explain the distortions to the files. Unless you are lucky,
resizing bitmaps within Flash is likely to make things a bit mungie.

Also the publish quality setting will not effect the quality of dynamically
loaded content. And unchecking compress will just give you a larger file ? it
has no effect on image quality of anything.

I just looked at the uploaded piece, and found (to my horror!) that I hadn't
even uploaded the big images! When you click on a small image, you are
supposed to get a bigger version on the stage all by itself (except for the
button to go back to the previous screen). I tried this last night and it
didn't happen but I thought it was from slow loading (which should have struck
me as odd since the jpegs are not huge). So much for doing stuff late at night!

Anyway, the comparison would be between the big view of a jpeg seen in the
Flash piece and the same jpeg just viewed using http to its location on the
server....

For example, compare the image at

http://www.sporkworld.org/cedarzoom/big.html

To my eye, the http image is considerably less blurry than the Flash one....

I made the piece with an 800 x 800 stage, which fits my largish monitor. The
middle size is still readable on my monitor. The tiny size barely is. But if
someone really has a 640 x 480 screen, the individual pixels will be larger so
it should be readable... If the text really is unreadable on a small monitor,
I can make it bigger at least in the full-page version that you get by clicking
on the text. (The very small TextArea component that appears on the pages with
images is so small that I don't think there will be enough text showing if I
make it a bigger font size...)

Anyway, if you have a small monitor and cannot read the text, please let me
know. On a big, high-resolution monitor, the pixels are smaller so text in a
small pixel size will be very small...

I thought that resizing a flash movie resulted in the same quality except for
the obvious fact that you get pixellization from sizes that don't have enough
pixels to show detail.

Thanks for the info on compression.

Millie

P.S. I am also having another problem. The text and image filename data is
in a single XML file which I parse when the program loads the XML. The thing
works fine in the test environment of Flash, but when I view with the
standalone player or online using a browser, some texts aren't there. Do I
need to make the Flash player ask for more memory or something? I would know
where to start looking for the bug if no texts at all appeared when I look
using the standalone player, but the problem happens with just one of two texts
out of dozens. My XML file is www.sporkworld.org/cedarzoom/sample.xml

I found the source of the problem with some texts not showing. It was too
embarrassing to repeat here.

I am beginning to feel extremely stupid. I think I am just stressed because
of my deadline!

I still have a blurriness problem.

Tnanks for the help so far.

MN

I have an application that loads jpgs (via XML) along with some text, etc. It
works but the jpegs end up much blurrier than they look outside of Flash. I
have a deadline in a few days for this, and it''s for an art journal, so I
can't afford to have bad-looking images.

I tried setting jpg quality to 100% in the Publish settings dialogue and also
I unchecked "compress flash movie," but the images still look bad.

BTW, I am using Flash MX 2004 Pro.

The URL is

http://www.sporkworld.org/cedarzoom/

It is in rough form without a loader and splash page at the moment, and the
loading is sluggish on dial-up, so be forewarned...

Millie

I am actually seeing the blurriness too. Don't quite know what to do about it.
What quality are you saving the external jpegs with? Are you positioning the
clip they are loaded into at an integral number of pixels? Try adding this line
to the first frame of your movie.

_quality="BEST";

I think Rothrock gave me the answer. The image positions were not on integer
coordinates (I placed container movie clips by dragging them onto the stage
using the authoring tool.) When I moved them to the nearest integer points,
the images got much less blurry.

Thank you!

I guess I will use "snap to pixels" from now on when I place things using the
mouse!

Millie